It was just like I was watching something that was a display of technique.

JANET VERNON, CREATIVE ASSOCIATE: I'm sure the original when it was done -- and it would have been contemporary when it was first performed -- I'm sure it wasn't a sanitised version of just technical steps.

There would have been emotion.

KATHY SWAN: Graeme Murphy and creative collaborator Janet Vernon have produced a story true to the original themes of love, deception and betrayal, but this Swan Lake is no fairytale and Odette is no swan.

JANET VERNON: From day one when Graeme went in he knew what he wanted to do emotionally for every single scene, every step, in actual point of fact.

It was hard for the dancers actually to try to pick up on emotion and not just steps.

I think Graham's choreography is much more moving, SIMONE GOLDSMITH, ODETTE: and I mean there's still a likeness to the traditional version but we've just sort of taken it a bit further on.

It's a little bit more contemporary.

And the pas de deux are classical but stretching it just that little bit further.

KATHY SWAN: This Odette is a princess who marries the prince but, with a nod to the late Lady Diana, it turns out there and three in that marriage.

It's a dramatic twist Graeme Murphy insists is also true to the original concept of 'Swan Lake'.

GRBU It always was a triangle -- I mean it was a white swan, a black swan and an evil sorcerer and of course a fabulous prince.

In essence, I think royal protocol hasn't changed very much.

I think princes, in time immemorial, have had their mistresses.

KATHY SWAN: There's something else the purists should know.

The story, set in Geneva in the 1930s, includes Freudian psychoanalysis to explain Odette's dancing with swans.

SIMONE GOLDSMITH: She's a much more tragic character actually, she's a real person.

She falls apart and the swan is actually her vision.

It's not Odette the character as a swan, it's her vision, her hallucination, maybe, in her mind.

GRAEME MURPHY: I have to make sense of a woman cavorting, for two acts, with a whole flock of swans.

And I think the only way that you can make sense of that is to suggest that the swans represent purity, even virginity, even, well fidelity, because swans mate for life, apparently.

So it's quite apt that the fantasy might go into the area of schizophrenia, madness or whatever, to allow this to happen.

Otherwise I have a real problem with why these people are hanging out with swans.

KATHY SWAN: But the swans and signets are dear to ballet lovers, who don't necessarily take kindly to radical changes.

MARILYN JONES, FORMER AUSTRALIAN BALLET ARTISTIC DIRECTOR: It's like an icon, in a way, to ballet, classical ballet, and it's something that is performed throughout the world by all the major classical ballet companies.

KATHY SWAN: Marilyn Jones, one of the Australian Ballet's principal dancers in its first season, in 1962, made her name performing the classical roles.

Now teaching at the WA Academy of Performing Arts, she warns against completely turning away from the classics, and not just because of their place in history.

MARILYN JONES: If they put soul into it and love into that role then it's not about technique.

The technique you shouldn't be noticing.

It is a challenge that is continued on and that's why ballerinas aspire to it.

KATHY SWAN: Graeme Murphy insists he means no disrespect.

GRAEME MURPHY: For an audience it is either an opportunity for them to reassure themselves that the world is safe and nothing has changed and 'Swan Lake' is still what it was 120 years ago.

I can't really do that.

So I think people who know me probably know that there is going to be more afoot than meets the eye.